


repatriated

by auxanges



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Birthday Fluff, Brother/Brother Incest, Cuddling & Snuggling, Dubiously Legal Activities, F/M, Fireworks, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, the sauciest tag watch out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-12
Updated: 2019-06-12
Packaged: 2020-05-01 17:54:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19182823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/auxanges/pseuds/auxanges
Summary: There’s a pleasant pause, then, as you lean against the dinosaur manatee thing. A lightness acting as a certain foil to the thickness of the Houston sky. Then someone squeaks a water wing, and Bro says, “That cloud kinda looks like a tasteful dong,” and the lightness somehow grows.





	repatriated

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sartorially](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sartorially/gifts).



> "It's Rose's birthday, or rather, her summer birthday. Having grown weary of the Christmas season eclipsing the holy day of giving Rose her due gifts, she enlists in the concept of a half-birthday. A concept that is popular with wintery birthdates, a half-birthday typically allows for things like pool parties, theme park trips, and other such activities that would not be available in cold, bitter months.
> 
> Ever the gracious party, she enlists in Bro and Dave Strider of Houston to ensure this is the dopest half-birthday of them all. Her goal? To make this one impossible to top come next year. (But she knows they'll blow her mind away somehow when the time comes.)
> 
> • I would love to see a sort of loving home environment with Bro and Dave, in that they are both adults and co-dependent on one another. References to past miscommunication is fine, but I'd like to avoid angst.  
> • Focus on Rose being happy to keep up with the Striders is also a plus. All three are equals and they are wrapped around her little finger.  
> • Cuddling... good!"
> 
> cuddling IS good and you should say it  
> may this gift live up to your strilondely standards. thanks for participating!

TT: Do you have summer plans?

TG: its adorable that you still think ive planned anything a day in my goddamn life

TT: Allow me to rephrase. 

TT: Would you like to make summer plans?

TG: what right now

TT: No, next century. Yes, right now, unless I’ve caught you at an inconvenient time. 

You regret the little pixels of doubt in your message the instant you send them into cyberspace. There is no place for such a trivial breach in confidence when you’re chatting with Dave, never mind that he is the latest in a long line of ego paradoxes. If both of you were to dig trenches around the proverbial bush, the universe would implode, or at the very least roll its eyes. 

TG: no times inconvenient to shoot the shit with my best gal

TG: so lets get to shootin

TG: yee those haws as it were

TT: I’m boycotting my birthday. 

TG: …well fuck me thats a hell of a haw to yee

TT: Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy celebrating my increasingly short walk to the grave as much as the next girl. 

TG: respectfully goth go on

TT. It’s just…

TT: Underwhelming. 

TG: underwhelming 

TT: Winter’s no sensible time to celebrate a birthday. If I’m being completely honest, I don’t much see the allure of Christianity co-opting a Pagan feast day just so Jesus could emerge from the womb when it’s a little colder out. 

TG: god tell me about it

TG: my bro used to wrap my xmas gifts in boxing week ads to quote skip a rung in the corporate ladder end quote

TT: What the hell is boxing week?

TG: fuck if I know

TG: not a week long hands throwing competition thats for sure

TG: haha we were not on the same page that year

The blood rushing to your head reminds you you’re currently upside-down on your bed: you rearrange your hair and prop yourself against a squid pillow, wrapping a few of its noodly appendages around your midsection like a Lovecraftian seatbelt. 

TT: I came to the conclusion that the best way to avoid a disappointing birthday is not to have one at all. 

TT: Rather, by engaging in a different celebration altogether. 

TG: what like a half birthday 

TT: Precisely like a half-birthday.

TG: oh fuck yeah

TG: if jesus can do it so can you as i always say

TT: You don’t always say that.

TG: no but i kinda wish i did

TG: ANYWAY gird your loins Lalonde your jpeg laden invitation will land in your inbox shortly

TT: Are you sure your brother won’t mind?

tt: I don’t mind.

TG: man fuck

TT: Much appreciated…I think.

tt: Was that so hard, Rose?

You suppose it wasn’t.

* * *

 

George Bush Intercontinental Airport is awash with quick-paced businessmen and, somehow, less cowboy hats than you had envisioned. You buy a Cinnabon and a coffee the size of your face and still manage to fall asleep on the cab ride over. 

Dave Strider and his older brother live in the high-rise all other high-rises are probably spawned from. Only one elevator is not out of commission, and it moans threateningly when you step inside and begin your slow ascent. 

There are no decorations or otherwise discernible markings on their door. You tuck your carry-on under your arm and rap your knuckles against it, swallowing down your heart when it tries making an exit via your throat. 

When Dave answers the door, you both just size each other up for a suspended minute or two. Your overactive brain soaks up his features like an invasive sponge: the uneven chop of his hair over his ears and brow; the easy slope of his shoulders betrayed by the tightness of his jaw. 

The very first words he says to you in person are, “You’re shorter than I thought you’d be.”

The second thing he says to you is, “Happy half-birthday, Rose. Jesus has fuck-all on you.”

You offer him a quirk of your lip, standing on tiptoe for a full four-count. “Better?”

“Acceptable.” Dave opens the door wider. “C’mon in. _Me_ shithole _es_ _su_ shithole.”

He grabs your bag before you realize it’s slipping out from your grip, and you’re suddenly aware of how real this all is—you’ve known Dave for years, but you have never known him like this.

 

A cranked fan in the den blasts cold air and the smell of bacon into your personal space. A TV and entertainment system are tucked into one corner, and the couch is mostly occupied by six feet and change of tacky button-down and jeans, Nintendo controller in hand. 

“Bro,” says Dave, amicably, “prove to the nice guest you’re capable of speech IRL.”

Bro—you’ve never been instructed to call him anything else—pauses his game and touches two fingers to the brim of his ball cap. “Charmed,” he says. His voice is a couple notches higher than Dave’s, and his accent is a little lazier, but he’s just as quiet. In person, Striders are mind-bogglingly chill. You take mental notes before you can stop yourself.

“You play Smash?” He asks next, nodding towards the television.

“I only do critical analyses of people who critically analyze Smash tournaments,” you confess. 

Dave is already rooting around for an extra controller: Bro shimmies into a more upright position and pats the cushion next to him. “Now’s good a time to start as any. Let’s see if you’re worthy of crashing with us.”

* * *

 

You’re definitely not worthy of crashing with the Striders, if your Smash proficiency is truly the metric by which you are to be judged. The three of you have tucked up your feet in a neat row, a drum line of button mashes controlling three different iterations of Link. In one of fate’s scales is Dave and Bro (Toon Link and a jailbroken yet impressively rendered Gerudo Link, respectively), elbowing each other in what you’re quite certain is a technical foul. In the other is you, grimly watching your ill-fated Young Link double jump off the stage into oblivion for no less than the thirtieth time. 

“I don’t think,” you announce, “that this is my forte.”

“Maybe not,” Bro concedes, switching off the TV and pulling off his shades. 

You squint at him. “Are you…wearing a second pair of glasses underneath?”

“Blue light is a real hazard to the eyes, Rose.” 

Dave snorts into his elbow, then hops off the couch. “I’ll show you where you’ll be sleeping.”

You didn’t know what to expect, really—your childhood home had an ostentatious guest room that was never used, since you, Mom, and Roxy liked to trade off giving the rare guest your own room instead. Dave leads you with little fanfare to the first closed door and pushes it open. 

You recognize a lot of his stuff from the handful of Snapchats he sent you before he declared Snapchat a dead language akin to Proto-Germanic. (That conversation had quickly derailed into both of you attempting to make Proto-Germanic rhymes for the next half hour, with surprising amounts of success.) There are Scholastic fair dinosaur posters on one wall, with little microphones and AC/DC lyrics in Bro’s scrawl on some of the velociraptors and other bipedal specimen; a handful of books occupy the turntable setup beneath the window, painted orange-yellow by the setting sun outside. You stifle a yawn. 

Dave puffs out a laugh through his nose, setting down your bag beside an inflatable mattress and a The Little Mermaid throw. “Sorry it’s not much.” 

“It’s perfect,” you say sincerely, crouching down to run your fingers over the throw. “I had contemplated bringing another blanket with me, but then I figured I may be too warm.”

“You figured right. Your half-birthday gift is sweating off half your body weight. Hope you brought a bucket.”

“A what?” 

“Nothing. You hungry?”

Dinner is an impressive concoction of party snacks and surprising cooking: Bro and Dave toss greasy jalapeño poppers and homemade crustless mini-quiches at each other from across the kitchen in increasingly risky trick shots. You sip your chocolate milk through a straw shaped like a duck, content to watch. 

They’ve really come into their own, you think, when your mind inevitably trails back to the subject of the Striders on nights where sleep is just out of reach. They chase down each other’s faults in ways they didn’t before—not because they couldn’t, you’re fairly certain, but because they wouldn’t let themselves think they could. They had cornered themselves, like your cat when she would launch herself into a cereal box then sprint into the nearest crevice of your room and wonder why the fuck she was trapped. Something in your gut unravels, and you think you recognize it as pride. It’s not entirely unfamiliar, but even more welcoming now. 

When Dave peaces out to claim the first shower, Bro looks up at you from the popper he’s dipping in his cold brew float. “Sup, space cadet?”

You blink, then shake your head, a little tiny bit sheepish. “Sorry. In my own thoughts.” 

“And me without my pennies.” He scoops some ice cream into a second mug and pushes it across the kitchen island to you. 

You pick up a popper. “How do you both pull it off? This whole…hospitality thing?” 

“Rose, the poppers were like five bucks, you’re giving us an awful lot of credit, here.” 

“No, not that,” you say, then, “ow, fuck,” when you bite into the jalapeño and remember how little you tolerate spice: Bro taps your mug, and you knock back cold brew. “This whole place feels more like a house than most of my birthdays.” 

He shrugs, rubbing the bridge of his nose under his glasses. “I’ll take that to mean me and Dave are doing something right.” Bro’s laugh is also quiet, like he’s trying to remember how to make the sound. 

“I’ll use this trip as a learning experience, then.” You take another sip: he’s used chocolate hazelnut ice cream instead of vanilla, which, if it were anyone else serving you, would make you grimace at the overwhelming sweetness. Here, though, it blends in with everything else. 

Bro gathers up the dishes and looks at you for a long minute. You catalogue it as his equivalent of a smile. “I think we all will,” he says finally. “Take the second shower and grab some shuteye. We have a hell of an agenda tomorrow.”

* * *

 

The Texan sun is a godless entity and so are its corvid worshippers. You are thrown into the waking world by the shrieking of birds outside the window, covering your eyes with the extra pillow Bro snatched for you when the offending rays bodyslam you fully out of dreamtime. Dave grumbles an interesting handful of curse-word neologisms in the direction of the window, throwing a soda cup at the pane to scatter the crows, before rolling over. You are in your coolest and comfiest pyjamas; he is in a pair of GOD KILLER boxers that some pen pal gifted him for his birthday. 

Shit. His birthday. “Dave,” you stage-whisper. “Dave, what about _your_ half-birthday?”

“Whaboutit,” he responds eloquently, followed by a thirty-second moan as he stretches his freakishly long limbs. 

“I did not even think to ask if you wanted a celebration of your own.” 

“Nah.” He finally sits up, mashing the heels of his hands into his eyes. His hair is imitating a porcupine that stuck a fork in a power socket. “This is plenty celebration for me. Bro thinks the same, it’s just fun to do it for someone else, you know?”

You don’t think you know, but you’re happy to play along. “I have to admit, I tried deciphering what you and your brother had planned for today weeks in advance. The results were suboptimal.”

“That’s how we work best, Lalonde,” Dave replies as he reaches for his shades. (You note, with no small degree of amusement, that he puts his eyewear on before putting on actual clothes.) “With suboptimal expectations.” 

“I’m always glad to be of service.”

Dave flips you off.

* * *

 

It’s too hot for any real traveling. You suspect transit tires would melt before you reached any reasonable destination. The rooftop wavers as you follow Dave and Bro up the fire escape before settling under your sneakers. It’s cloudy: humidity clings to your skin like healing tattoos, winding around your hair and opening your chest cavity like you dove into a pool of Vicks. Someone’s gone through the trouble of lining the place with sod, and it glimmers with last night’s whisper of rain. 

Dave has already kicked off his sneakers, wiggling his toes in the grass. You suppose it’s easier to get your greenery fix one floor up rather than fifty down. Bro follows suit, then disappears into a shed. 

You watch him behind the safety of loaned sunglasses and a lilac visor, only a tiny bit suspicious. “Is this—”

“Dope?” Dave asks. 

“I was going to say ‘legal.’”

He laughs, bending to roll up his pants legs halfway up his calves. His sock tan is atrocious; if you let yourself concentrate on his face, you can make out similar lines behind the bands of his shades. “No one else really comes up here. Not even on the Fourth. Me and Bro, we got this place looking like a fuckin’ Ikea showroom threw up on the ground. A firework-watching cuddle pile with a thread count for the ages.”

“Dope, indeed.” You kind of wish you had made the trip up a few days earlier. 

Dave stretches his arms skyward until you hear both his shoulders pop, then flops backwards onto the grass, his knees bent in some half-hearted yoga pose. You copy him, staring up at the pillars of patient stormclouds and letting yourself not really do anything, for once. 

You have been an adult for most of your short life. 

“Dave, you lazy fuck.” Bro’s voice bounces off satellite dishes and overheated concrete like a tiny platoon of eldest Striders surrounding you to chide his brother. “You could’ve at least started the water.” 

“And steal your opportunity to show off for Rose? You wound me, sir.” 

Dave shields his eyes as he tips his head back so his crown is resting on the grass. Bro is standing over him in khaki shorts and a muscle shirt that reveals…well, muscle—tan lines at his knuckles and halfway up his biceps reveal another little corner of the zillion-piece Strider jigsaw you are blindly feeling your way through. The disastrously eye-catching tone of his arms is not helped any by the inflatable cargo slung over his shoulder. 

“What are those?” you ask, when you are able to headlock your wandering thoughts back to the penthouse roof. 

Bro looks down at himself. “They’re shorts. You wear them over your—”

He cuts himself off to catch the shoe Dave whips at his face, letting it drop with a snicker. “Tough crowd. It’s our cool-down recipe. Minimal brain cells required for this bad boy.”

“Thank god for that,” Dave chimes in, before executing an impressive dodge of his shoe being launched right back at his face. 

You roll to a seated position and extend your arms. Bro hands you one of the shrivelled blobs of colour, and you get to work earning your keep like a true sweat-soaked southerner.

* * *

 

It’s another dinosaur. 

“It’s not a dinosaur,” says Dave around the beach ball he’s inflating. “It’s a ribodon, a Tortonian genus of _Sirenia_.”

You make an understanding noise as you poke the flotation ring’s snout. “So it’s a manatee dinosaur. I see.”

“You’re cruel, Lalonde.” He seals the ball and flicks it up with all five fingers towards you. You give it a little bump with your elbow towards Bro, who sticks a foot out of the pool to kick it back at Dave in an unhurried kind of keep-up triangle.

“Water’s great,” coaxes Bro. He’s mysteriously acquired a cooler full of cheap vodka and Capri-Suns. You snag a pouch of the latter for yourself and gingerly dip your toes in. It’s cool without jarring your nerves, and startles a laugh out of you.

Dave follows suit, butt-scooching along the grass until he can kick his feet over the edge of the pool. “Lizards have it so awesome,’ he sighs, with little elaboration.

You slurp your Capri-Sun as daintily as you can.

There’s a pleasant pause, then, as you lean against the dinosaur manatee thing. A lightness acting as a certain foil to the thickness of the Houston sky. Then someone squeaks a water wing, and Bro says, “That cloud kinda looks like a tasteful dong,” and the lightness somehow grows.

* * *

 

You stay half-submerged in eight inches of quickly warming water until your feet turn into prunes. The urge to keep lying under the cover of clouds is admittedly pretty strong, but the Striders convince you back to the four hideous walls of their little getaway from the universe. You’re quite happy to comply, especially once cool air from the fan blasts your frizzy fringe into next week.

“Can I ask you something?” you say, when you and Dave are flopped across the couch while Bro excuses himself to order your half-birthday dinner (proclaimed the most mundane this side of the border). One of your headbands is doing its best to push his hair away from his eyes, uncharacteristically free of protection: from your semi-draped position across his legs and torso, you can see gemstone-drops of water on his eyelashes from his Final Dunk, a ritual you politely declined to partake in.

He raises his head to look at you. The shift of his muscle under your ear is almost enough to make you laugh. “Fire away.”

Now that you have the floor, you feel that seed of hesitation again—the one that tugs at your sleeve and says, but what if you’re wrong? You roll one shoulder to shake it free. “I’ve been wondering how you and Bro do it.”

“Either your double entendre game is slipping as you get used to Texas, or I need a bit more information as to what ‘it’ actually is.”

“All of…” you give a vague gesture with one hand, which Dave follows, his eyes flicking away from the window and ceiling lights when they get too strong. “This. This bond you’ve forged.”

“You mean family?”

“I certainly do not.” You let your hand fall again: he prods at each of your knuckles in turn. “I have a family, and we don’t—I don’t know, coexist like you and Bro do.”

Dave softens. It’s easier to see, like this, when his defences are folded on the coffee table and shoved under some Claire’s accessory you bought in the tenth grade. “Ain’t no workarounds for sorting your shit. If there were, I’d have given you the cheat codes years ago.”

“I don’t use cheat codes.”

“It’s the symbolism, Rose. The symbolism.”

You do allow yourself a laugh, this time.

He continues. The thing you like about Dave is the ease with which he monologues, when he forgets to be his own critic. “Bro and me, we took years to sync up. Now we put the 'men' in 'mensies.'”

“That’s pretty bad.”

“It’s pretty bad. But do you get it? We pushed each other around instead of pushing each other up. It didn’t come naturally to us. With you…”

Dave trails off, picking up a lock of your hair. His hands are warm. “With you, raising the bar is easy as breathing.”

Your ears are hot for reasons completely unrelated to the weather.

“You make us better, Rose. You don’t even have to try. I can tell when you try.” When you cock an eyebrow, Dave hastily adds, “It’s not a bad thing! I’m just saying you don’t have to. You’ve looked so goddamn content since you got here.”

“That’s probably because I am,” you reply. “Content, I mean.”

Strider smiles—unplanned ones—are few and far between. You do not claim the one Dave offers you (toothless, surprised, and heart-wrenchingly happy) as a victory prize: you tuck it away for safekeeping as a memento of sorts, a reminder of the even ground you have struck so far above sea level.

There’s the thud of a shoulder against the door, followed by a muffled expletive and the clatter of the latch. “Sup,” says Bro upon re-entry, balancing a handful of takeout containers on one arm. “What are we talking about?”

“Feelings,” you answer. Your voice is a little distorted, and you realize you’ve let yourself rest against Dave’s chest again, his heartbeat as steady as a march.

Bro makes a face. “Terrific. So I’ll just be in the kitchen for the next hour—”

“Get over here, you emotionally constipated chopstick,” Dave interrupts jovially.

He gets over here, muttering “chopstick" under his breath and setting the food on the table.

The couch is a lot smaller when the three of you are not sitting upright and trying to avoid computer-generated cliff dives and socked feet aimed at your controllers. Bro makes this fact even more obvious that it previously was when he lets himself drop dramatically over both of you, a hand to his forehead. His hat catches you in the jaw, and you swat it off without thinking; you’re rewarded with another shock of white hair, poking free in every direction now that you’ve released Bro’s ‘do unto an unsuspecting world. You tousle it, and he bitches. The world continues to turn.

* * *

 

It takes less long than you had guessed to re-orient yourselves on the couch. Bro shimmies underneath you, the broader set of his shoulders seemingly perfect for Dave to jam his face against when the sun begins to set. In what continues to be a semi-birthday miracle, Bro’s glasses are also off while he takes a power nap: you watch the crease in his brow from where you’re nestled against his side. Behind you, Dave is also half-asleep. Your mind is pleasantly shut off, but you would hate to miss out on this with something as trivial as rest.

The drone of the fan is a goddamn siren song; every once in a while, some piece of construction equipment outside screeches, and Dave twitches, curls tighter against you. You decide the Strider puzzle isn’t one that needs immediate solving if you’re as entwined in it as you feel you are.

Eventually, the lemon chicken smells too good to ignore, and Bro stretches and attempts to sit up. Dave headbutts him in the solar plexus. “Quit it, man, I’m hungry.”

“What did you even order? Is there any food left in the fuckin’ state?”

“That’s for me to know and the birthday girl to not give a shit about.” Bro tosses up some utensils, which Dave catches before they can impale either one of you anywhere embarrassing. It has the side effect of forcing him into a sitting position isolated from sleepy territory. He’s more dishevelled than he was this morning. You are smitten.

* * *

 

You eat with no hurry and total disregard for order of courses. There’s enough food on the table to feed a small army, or, apparently, two Strider brothers and their esteemed guest.

“Okay, Bro’s next.” You hum. “Henry VIII, Napoleon, or Nero.”

Bro’s glasses are back, in a way, copying the headband still in Dave’s hair: his eyes are as quiet as the rest of him, barring the boiled-sugar amber colour that keeps drawing your attention even as he stares at the ceiling. “I got it,” he says finally. “Fuck Nero, marry Henry VIII, and kill Napoleon.”

“Fuck you,” Dave counters, “Who wouldn’t want Napoleon in the sack?”

“Someone who’s a foot taller than him, is who. Double-fuck you.”

You spear a baby corn. “There’s a thirty-percent chance your chosen husband will execute you.”

“It’s not about the decapitation,” says Bro, “so much as the legacy.”

“Man alive,” mutters Dave, which prompts Bro to reply, “Nah, dude. Man dead,” and then they’re attempting to introduce execution by noogieing, you think. How innovative.

You stack the empty containers while Dave makes you all cocoa, shaking cinnamon sugar over the foam. It soothes your throat, stiff from laughing more than you have in recent memory. (You’re not a sad person, but you cannot deny this significant change in happiness that occupies the apartment.) After a series of lightning-quick showers (and a half-serious comment from Dave about the timing deficiencies in the household), you’re sipping still-steaming cocoa with your elbows against the counter. 

Bro raises his mug to get your attention. “We have one more thing planned for tonight.” 

“Oh?” 

He nods to the fire escape, and you follow him back out into the darkening evening, if a bit slower to preserve your drink. 

Dave is waiting for you, cross-legged in a veritable nest of pillows. Fuzzy blankets of every hue line the grass, with a five-hour looping video of a bonfire playing on his laptop. His grin reheats your cocoa. “Grab some floor, Lalonde.” 

You grab some floor, laying back against the cushions with a sigh. “Oh, this is glorious.” 

“What? We haven’t even started.” Dave steals your mug for a sip, then uses it as a pointer in a mirror of his brother’s earlier action. 

Said brother is setting up a row of firecrackers, an unlit sparkler poking out of one corner of his mouth. He’s so engrossed in his task that he doesn’t see the gratitude on your face, which is kind of merciful, but then he ruins it by looking up, lowering his glasses and winking. “Hell of a birthday, Rose.”

“Hell of a birthday,” you agree. Your facial muscles hurt something fierce, in rigorous competition with your cardiac ones. “Are you available for more holidays?”

“I’m sure we can come to an arrangement.” 

The first fireworks go off with a whistle-pop, bright green and unapologetic: Bro staggers the rest before settling against your unoccupied side, the flares reflected off his shades. By the time they fade enough to let the stars struggle through again, you’re half-asleep, mismatched Strider arms draped over your midsection, smiling triumphantly at the heavens. 

Your name is Rose and you did jack shit for your birthday, and it was awesome. 


End file.
